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June 1st, 2017

Why the hell not?

Lovely Tyrant's broadcast was pre-empted by tennis, and supposedly delayed by 90 minutes, but here we are hours later, and still nada, so you know what? Let's just go ahead with my threat of watching some random Galaxy Angel.Edit: Christ. The actual episode was godawful. A bunch of recap and exposition void of any humor or progress at all, Blonde-o kissed whose-its and then got massively melodramatic over it, and… that's it. That's all of it. He didn't even do goddamned anything. Hasn't done a goddamned thing the entire show. It's almost a joke that they keep trying to push the depth of emotion these (non) characters have for an inert sack of nothing. Maybe we'll just keep reliving the past on Thursdays for the rest of the season.

And because I like to hurt the things I love, let's talk about the first half of season 2's seventh episode (10 minute mini-episode format), in what may be a naked attack on the very concept of humor. Admittedly, it's probably far more likely that it's the result of some flavor of Shaft-esque budgetary collapse and had to be made with a few twigs, a paperclip, and some lint, but I'm trying to illustrate a point here. The bit that they're do is that they just finished some kind of crazy adventure, and as they recap their heroism, various sudden temporary shocks happen which are then immediately explained away in a series of anticlimaxes. At the end, it's revealed that they didn't do jack squat at all and the entire universe is doomed. Ten straight minutes of *ahem* "world building exposition", revealed to be a crock of crap. Almost prophetic, really, except that fifteen years later, this would become hours upon hours, and not some kind of anti-humor 'gag.' It's just the way things are.

Moving on from that to the final season (Rune doesn't exist), since I like to bring it up a lot, and we have something done in a very similar format, and yet completely different. I speak of the soap opera parody. Forte is murdered, and we follow a procedural journey to uncover the tangled web, getting more convoluted with each step, people being murdered one after another, up to Milfie being revealed as Forte's killer because beef stroganoff isn't the same thing as hashed beef, as well as the secret love child of Mint and Ranpha. It's absurd, yet delivered completely straight, without anybody screaming about how impossible things are or how each successive reveal doesn't make sense. There's even a sarcastic emotional insert song. It's an actual parody, that understands the craziness that is part and parcel of soap operas while ramping things up to truly ridiculous levels, respects the audience enough to be in on the joke without having to yell it from the rafters, and uses its characters to poke fun without resorting to their gimmicks or sacrificing their personalities. It too, is delivered almost entirely by exposition, totally deadpan, yet covers more ground and more plot twists in ten minutes than many shows supposedly driven by their plots and characters do in ten episodes, all just to be completely ridiculous.